September 17th

This was a week of controversies. Since one of the most significant issues this week was a famous Youtuber’s racist outburst, the final section of this roundup comes with a general content warning for discussions of harassment, abuse, racism etc. In the mean time, there are plenty of pieces on other topics to look at this week as well, including narrative technique, sound design, and genre.

Hitting home

This roundup begins with two videos that consider the role of sound design in a game’s impact on its players’ emotions and its narrative message.

BOTTLE FULL OF CARTRIDGES – DEEP HELL (Content warning: addiction, drugs)Deep Hell’s take on game addiction vs. drug addiction skirts around the common platitudes (“too much of anything is bad for you”) and instead considers the social context that inflects each habit.

“Voyeurism isn’t new to games – we see it in franchises like Watch Dogs, where you hack electronic devices in civilians’ homes to view their private lives or read a passerby’s text messages. […] Tacoma’s approach feels less intrusive (even as you view characters sing in the shower or see flirtatious encounters unfold), because we know that the characters agreed to being watched and tracked.”

Remix

Further examining genre conceits, these two critics consider games in terms of how they relate to their creative context.

“even among its peers, Socket stands out; not because it tries to do anything different, but because it commits to the Vic Tokai ethos far beyond the point it’s supposed to. The game is so invested in borrowing and remixing contemporary trends that it loses sight of why it’s borrowing and remixing. Thus it remixes these elements to the point of emptiness, where all we’re left with is the fact of remixing. It’s a performance of tropes divorced of any context and undertaken for its own sake.”

Inconsistent information

In discourse about discourse this week, Kotaku published two pieces on historical shifts in how factual information on games is collated and managed.

“On a page in Nukapedia’s forum collecting criticisms of the new videos, the community at large indicates that they just feel like Fandom doesn’t know, or care, about the wiki they’ve built and the standards they hold themselves to. The community had specific problems with each of the videos, from grainy video quality, to inaccurate and inconsistent information, to the monotone voice of the narrator. To top it all off, the community hadn’t been consulted at all during production.”

Opportunities for indignity

Writing on skill has been important this week, not least because of the renewed argument over whether critics ought to have a particular level of skill as players.

“Don’t smooth away the opportunities for indignity – that gives ground to the notion that the only correct way to play is to stroll unimpeded through a garden of cultivated delights. That is the jerks’ view. And besides, what would be the point of Cuphead‘s cartoon visuals if the player weren’t roped into performing some slapstick?”

Inclusivity and Sociality

This section comes with a general content warning for racism, harassment, and abuse. Click the “Let me see!” link below to open it.

Let me see!

Don’t allow you to hide

Moving on to the content-warning-led section of this roundup, we begin with four articles on the latest PewDiePie debacle.

“The problem now for many gamers (yes gamers, not Neo-Nazis, not alt-righters…gamers) is that their once hidden gaming practices are front and center. Twitch, Mixer, YouTube, and other forms of live streaming don’t allow you to hide in the comfort of anonymity.”

Malevolent machine

Looking more broadly at writing on toxicity in games culture, this set of pieces offers analyses, context, and possible strategies for moving forwards.

What Happened | Brendan Vance Brendan Vance’s analysis of gaming’s hate movements and rebuttal to a recent article on Gamergate’s origins offers an alternative not only to the “Old Man Murray caused Gamergate” claim, but also to the “Gamergate caused Trump” claim.

“This is the way I prefer to talk about the datapoints Adkins has assembled: not as a direct causal chain linking edgelords to Gamergate, but rather as adjacent subroutines operating within one big, malevolent machine. What we see within this historical cross-section is, in the end, quite a familiar sight: many men climbing higher in society by pushing other people down.”

Vol 3, No 2 | ETC Press The new issue of academic journal Transactions of DiGRA is out, and it looks pretty promising, with articles on “creative communities” and “playful fandom” as well as game design frameworks and formalist analysis.

Subscribe

Critical Distance is community-supported. Our readers support us from as little as one dollar a month. Would you consider joining them?